Robert Stacy McCain, of the Washington Times' Insider Politics blog, cites counter-arguments to Andrew G. Bostom's AT article yesterday insisting that Congress must recognize the Armenian Holocaust. He writes:

...the Armenians suffered horribly under the Ottoman Empire, [but] I'm nevertheless skeptical that congressional "recognition" will be particularly helpful to Armenians (or anyone else) nearly a century after the fact.

Garin Hovannisian, a recent UCLA graduate and a descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide, shares that sense of skepticism:

That Congress "finds" the genocide to be a fact makes the tragedy no more real than its refusal, so far, has made it unreal. Truth does not need a permission slip from the state.

As an heir, moreover, of an American tradition of limited government, I am annoyed that the legislature is poking into a sphere in which it has neither business nor experience: the province of truth. It is bad enough that a committee of aristocrats governs the conventions of politics, economics and human rights. We the citizens scarcely need to sign over the laws of nature, too, lest gravity be repealed and the whole race goes floating about the universe.

Garin and his fellow Armenian-American, Alec Mouhibian -- also a recent UCLA grad -- operate the Lucky Frown blog, where most of what they write has nothing to do with being Armenian, and everything to do with being American. [....]

...identity politics is exactly what Garin sees at work in the matter of H.R. 106. "The Armenian genocide resolution is, quite simply, the raison d'etre of the Armenian-American lobby," he writes, describing the resolution as the project of "congressmen with Armenian constituencies."